The Devoted

by Blair Hurley

  Nicole waited for her mother to say, “Bill, please,” or to put a hand on his arm. But she remained quiet, waiting for the answer.

  “I can see whoever I want.”

  “We’re worried about you,” said Paul, from the doorway.

  “Who the hell asked you? Why is he in this discussion, anyway?”

  “Because he cares about you, like the rest of us,” said her mother. “And it’s not just the late nights. It’s the books you’ve been reading—the things you’ve been talking about—”

  Nicole could feel their eyes, diagnosing her. She turned around again. “I’m sick of going to church. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to be Catholic.” She was warming up now. “All the sin and shame! Am I supposed to be afraid of, of life? It’s corrupt.”

  Silence fell; they all sat at the table and listened to the buzz of the refrigerator, the gentle nautical swish of the dishwasher. Her mother stood up. “You will always be Catholic. You were baptized.” Her voice was grimly triumphant. “I don’t understand you.”

  She had to explain. “There’s this Buddhist monk in Colorado. I have to meet him. If you would let me go and see him—”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” her father said. “I’ve seen this happen to people—they think they want to join a New Age cult or chant ‘Hare Krishna.’ You don’t understand. You’ll end up ruining your life. You’re too young to understand.”

  Her mother began to cry. “Look what you’re doing to me. Just look.” Paul put his hand on his mother’s shoulder. Nicole hated him then.

  Her father said there would be curfews and check-ins from now on. In a glimpse she saw what the next weeks and months of her life would look like: her mother’s black silence in the house, forced marches to church. She couldn’t do it anymore. She was tired. Her father’s argument didn’t matter. None of them mattered.

  She went to her bedroom and crouched on the floor beside her bed, and heard them all come upstairs after her, shutting off lights. She waited for her mother to open the door and press a hand into her hair, to tell her all was forgiven; there was still that chance. But she didn’t come.

  “I was already a runaway, long before I left,” she told Jocelyn.

  She waited until she was sure they were asleep. They were so trusting, still; every door was unlocked. They thought the power of their disappointment could hold her here. She called Jules.

  “No note,” she said. “Just go.”

  “So you just left?” Jocelyn asked.

  “Jules called Eddie. We needed a car, and I knew he wouldn’t want to be left behind. His parents were gone for a month—he thought he’d be back before he was even missed.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

  This was the most difficult part of the story, the part she feared no one would understand. All the cruelty and joy of it mixed. “You have to understand what it was like,” she began.

  PART TWO

  The week after she and the Master have sex for the first time, she comes to the Zendo as always and chants and meditates along with the others. She keeps her eyes down, and she tries to hide the trembling in her body when he passes along the aisle. He sees, though; he knows she is on a razor’s edge, struggling to keep herself under control, to pretend she doesn’t care, that she’s all right. After the other members have dispersed, she’s still there, kneeling on her mat, and he waves her into his private room, careful not to touch her, to startle or hover.

  “You came back,” he says. “I’m happy.”

  Last week she’d bolted up and out of the room, fleeing her own embarrassment and confusion. “Of course, I wanted to apologize,” she says. “I was—confused. I don’t think we should—” She stops, begins again, tries to explain.

  He listens to her patiently. “And you think what happened was wrong?” he asks finally.

  “Well . . .”

  “That’s the old Catholic in you. It’s going to take some work to drive that thinking out of your head, I can tell.”

  You have to destroy all the old gods, he knows, if there’s any hope of changing your perception. Even the idols like guilt and shame and decency are distractions, old tribal ways of keeping people in line. For his students, especially all these American girls and women who grew up with a sense of themselves, he has to start with the concept of muga: no-self. It’s painful, learning that you are not an immortal being, and that no one is judging you, weighing every thought and feeling that passes through. All your adolescent fears and desires don’t have the special weight of sin.

  She’s still talking: “I think I made a mistake. I think we should—”

  “You think, you think,” he says irritably. “Who are you?”

  “I—”

  “Have you learned nothing?”

  She flushes; even her scalp under her fine hair is pink. Now she will listen to anything he says. In Zen koans, struggling monks are often slapped or hit by their teachers, spurring them on to revelation. He rises and walks to the corner of the room, where the teaching stick is waiting. He picks it up, tests the light, springy weight of it. “Do you need a lesson?” he asks.

  There are so many warring emotions on her face; he loves how poorly she hides them, pride and shame and confusion and desperate need. He loves the storm of her. “Yes, I do,” she says.

  He is gentle; just one strike across the shoulders, not enough to raise a bruise. It’s the thought that counts, the lesson. She’ll remember the dread, the delight of his walk across the room, the sound of the stick swishing through the air. And the tenderness that can follow.

  It takes time to discover what no-self really means.

  INDRA’S NET

  She was just barely eighteen and at a pancake chain sometime early in the morning, sitting across the table from Jules and Eddie. She pulled out her book and read, sipping lukewarm coffee.

  Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each eye of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. . . . If we now select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.

  —Francis Cook, The Jewel Net of Indra

  She closed the book and spread out the road map stolen from her mother’s car, gapping in the folds, nubby at the corners, with her family’s summer trip to the Catskills marked in ballpoint pen. The roads were a tangle of colored threads. They were on Route 9 now, still the road they always took to the outlet mall, still barely away from home. In an hour, they’d be out of Massachusetts, farther on the road than she’d ever been. Eddie wanted to go to South America. Colorado was on the way, sort of.

  “Will your parents come after you?” Jules asked.

  “I don’t know.” She put her hand on the sticky table and pulled it back in disgust. It was a few days after the blowup. She’d left a note saying that she was going to visit Paul for the weekend. Then she sent him a letter. Tell them not to worry, she wrote. I have to go and do something. Remember the quest I told you about? It’ll be all right.

  She wasn’t sure what he would do. Whether he would hold them off or not. A police car whisked by, its siren going. She slouched in her booth.

  They took the back roads when they could, afraid of cops stopping them, sure her parents had called the police and given them the school portrait of her in her navy sweater. Jules wrote in his notebook, chronicling the trip. It’s going to be like On the Road, he promised. But better than a novel, because it’s our lives. It’s going to be monumental. They found the quiet roads, where dense green trees walled them in and deer flickered through the branches. As Jules drove she leaned her back against the door and rested her bare feet in his
lap. Eddie propped his chin on his hand, staring out the window. They passed still, small lakes that looked like mirrored lockets, and familiar houses—clapboard and square, Colonial prim.

  They picked up a hitchhiker who claimed he’d been to every state and Cuba too, who carried a burlap sack on his shoulder and told Nicole that travel, seeing the country like this, would change her life. He’d heard of the Karmapa; he knew some people who’d joined the monastery in Colorado. He had all the badges of a home-leaver: his gray-brown hair, in dreadlocks under a bandanna; his T-shirt, rumpled; his fingernails, black. He could tell they were rookies, but he was willing to give some pointers. He showed them how to forage in dumpsters, sliding in the slick black sea of garbage bags, how to steal old bagels off the carts they were loading up for the homeless shelter. They weren’t at that point yet, but they would be, before this was all over. The hitchhiker smelled like pot and motor oil. The smell was wildly exciting.

  When she went out into a grove of trees in the dark to pee the hitchhiker tried to grab her and hurl her to the ground. He grabbed her underwear when it was down around her knees and yanked it the rest of the way. She kicked and hissed like a cat, and cried out her mother’s prayer, Saints preserve us. He backed off. Catholic magic is strong, she told Jocelyn.

  She convinced Jules and Eddie to leave him there by the side of the road, and they peeled away with the tires screaming. Jules didn’t say anything but he knew why, she was sure of it. His arm was tight around her. Already she was grateful for these simple gestures of comfort.

  “I wonder what my dad’s going to think,” Jules said, driving one-handed. “One day, I’m gone. No note, no nothing. I told him for months I’d do it. He said, ‘Good riddance.’” He chewed his lip thoughtfully. “He doesn’t give a fuck.”

  Days after leaving, at an all-night diner, she called Paul and listened to him say, “Hello, hello.” Hearing his voice made her feel like crying, but she didn’t; she gently lowered the phone to its cradle, listening to his voice grow fainter and then disappear.

  They traveled through the big northern cut of New York, carefully pooling their loose change for a budgeted meal at rest stops once in a while. Eddie fighting with Jules one-handed while driving, Jules punching back good-naturedly. Past Delhi, Sidney, then taking Route 88, wandering up and down through the state. Through Horseheads and Big Flats. On through the Cinnamon Lake State Forest.

  The recollected go forth to lives of renunciation. They take no pleasure in a fixed abode. Like wild swans abandoning a pool, they leave one resting place after another.

  —The Dhammapada

  They got sidetracked for most of the summer, smoking weed in Toledo in abandoned buildings with gangs of not-quite-homeless teenagers. Jules wanted to stay. These were his people. There was time enough for the monastery, for the robe and bowl, plenty of time. She could panhandle pretty well, sitting on sidewalks with cheerful cardboard signs. She knew not to look too dirty or needy, not to look like she was going to use the money for pot, to smile but not make eye contact. The people don’t want to have to look at you. Don’t make them feel sad when they’re tossing money, make them feel they’re doing good. Say thank you. Say God bless.

  At night she walked along the riverbank and threw stones in the water, whistling to the dark bands of people on the other side. The kids who settled on the bank had codes for cops, for social workers, for scary homeless people, for parents. Parents were always coming to the campouts by the river, looking for their kids because the cops had given up. They came armed with handfuls of wallet-sized photographs, distributing them to the blank-eyed kids sitting around campfires with their school backpacks on one shoulder, their good shoes full of holes. The parents were thin and tired. They spoke in monotones, asking if anybody had seen their child. Sometimes she looked at one of the photos and wondered how this bright-cheeked boy or girl in the school picture, with the little vest, the flower barrettes, could possibly be one of the wary gremlins she sat with each night. They were slippery and wise as stray cats. They knew the right dumpsters, they knew where to get weed and coke and whatever handful of candy-colored pills you wanted. They had friends in camping shops who gave them iodine tablets so they could fill their bottles from the river. They knew to sleep with their belongings under their heads, like indigents or inmates, or else their things would be gone by morning. They knew to burn the edges of a cut with a needle passed through a flame. In a few months, she learned these things, too. Her hair grew long and wild and she hacked some of it off and it grew back in ragged bunches. She got used to the smell of not washing: oniony and too sweet.

  She stared hard at the photos of missing kids and wondered: Girl, where are you?

  For the two months she lived on the river she talked to the other kids about impermanence and what she was learning about the Middle Way and the Eightfold Path. She told them about the realm of hungry ghosts, where the greedy and selfish go after death. The ghosts have caved-in bellies and skull-like faces with giant open jaws. They are always starving and never satisfied; they shove dirt into their mouths in their desperate hunger; they wander the world, restless and rapacious. The Buddha says we should pity them, because we are no different, she told the kids who would listen, who still liked hearing stories. If you’re here on this river, it’s because you’re never satisfied, you never have enough, whether it’s food or money or love.

  She saw Jules on the edge of the circle, listening without any trace of irony in his eyes. Afterward, when they were walking by the river looking for a place to sleep for the night, he said, “That’s true, what you said. About the ghosts.”

  “What part of it?”

  “That we’re no better than them.”

  While they sat under an overpass he told her that when he was a kid, his mother used to punish him for being bad by locking him in his room without dinner. He would howl and whine, but nothing would get her to open the door. In the morning she’d be sober and sorry and make him a giant breakfast—pancakes and bacon and mounds of eggs. “But only a few bites in, I’d start to feel awful, because I knew that pretty soon, the food would be gone, and she’d be angry again. I couldn’t eat, I was so miserable.” He laughed bitterly. “My mother never understood it. She always thought she could bribe me into forgiving her.”

  Nicole put her arms around Jules and hugged him as tightly as she could, wanting to press the sadness out of him, convince him of her constancy. She thought she might have made him a convert. He wouldn’t meditate with her; he scoffed at any prayers she tried to recite from her book. But every night he was there with the others, listening.

  It wasn’t that he had converted to Buddhism, she was beginning to realize. He was in the process of converting to something else. One night they were lying together on the damp concrete slab under an overpass, a nest of scuzzy sleeping bags underneath them, the kids in the distance quiet, the cicadas blasting out their hopeful song. He said, “Everyone back home is so obsessed with looking good, they don’t even think about what they look like on the inside, or whether they’re even interesting people, for chrisssakes. . . . But you’re not like that. You live with such a clear motherfucking beautiful sense of purpose. I love that. I love it.”

  She was afraid, because they had never used the word “love.” She couldn’t speak for the fearful pounding of her heart. Jules rolled closer, kissed her on each cheek, on her forehead. “You’re like an arrow. Like the sound of a bell. You’re clear and straight and pure. You’re beautiful.”

  She’d been hanging out with a girl called Skunk, whose ears were studded up and down, her head shaved except for a dark center stripe of hair. Skunk wasn’t good at panhandling. She kept staring at passersby with her “yeah, keep walking” glare. Mostly she bummed burger scraps and the occasional handful of pills off her friends. Nicole would find her sitting on the concrete pilings by the river most days, glowering at nobody and sharpening toothpicks for her growing ashy tattoos.

  “Why are you so angry,
Skunk?” Eddie asked her one night when they were around somebody’s fire. Eddie was in his element, impressing kids with his political screeds. Many nights he wandered away from the fire with a scruffy Mohawked girl under his arm. “Why’d you run away?”

  Skunk spat into the fire. “I don’t know. Same reason you did.”

  From the dark they heard someone whistle. They had laid out their shoes and socks to dry after wading, and they were still getting dressed when a woman entered their circle. “I’m looking for my daughter,” she started to say, then stopped. One raised arm fell slackly to her side, and a flutter of school photos fell to the ground. Nicole picked one up. It showed a mousy little kid with long brown hair, heavy bangs. Smiling.

  The mother pointed at Skunk. “Molly. Molly. Oh my God.” She stood without moving.

  Skunk tried to run, but Jules stuck out his leg and tripped her. She leapt up, but by then her mother was on her, hugging, sobbing. Skunk was stiff in the embrace, but she didn’t fight.

  Nicole and the others retreated to a safe distance. Sometimes the parents started asking about kids that weren’t theirs. Go home already. Go home. She watched Skunk put out her shaky arm and touch her mother. They walked away together, and for a moment Nicole wished she, too, had been found.

  “Why did you trip her?” she asked Jules.

  “I don’t know. Just thought she wanted to go home.”

  They went down an alley and leaned on a wall together and he held her close. “Hey, flower girl,” he said. “Hey, lotus blossom. What about the Karmapa?”

  She realized with surprise that he cared about the quest, too. That at the end of it was the promise of peace and freedom from pain that he’d maybe never known. That night they found Eddie and went back to the car and drove on. They weren’t like those other kids; they had someplace to be. Somewhere they had to go. Enlightenment was waiting.